Here’s another one submitted by one of you. This one is a famous quad! Clever, but easy enough …
Famous Pairs #16
Other Crap
Uncle Scoopy's world-weary musings about naked celebrities, sports, humor and other important, manly things.
The Apostles
Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John
Correct
Not exactly – there were 12 Apostles, and I think only two of the 12 are pictured. (Maybe, maybe not. Those identities are disputed.)
But I know that you have solved it.
There were 4 apostles and 12 disciples. Believe me, a catholic upbringing will burn that shit into your brain.
No. You forgot the terms. There were 12 apostles and 4 evangelists.
The apostles were, of course, also disciples, but they were only 12 disciples of an indeterminate amount. Jesus called all his disciples together and hand-picked twelve of them to be his apostles, and granted them certain power. There were many more disciples referenced within scripture who were not considered to be apostles, and there have been many disciples who have followed Jesus since he died. In that sense, all the apostles were disciples, but not all disciples are apostles.
From the Gospel of Luke
(6:13 KJV): And when it was day, he called unto him his disciples: and of them he chose twelve, whom also he named apostles.
6:13 Catholic version: And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles.
The most famous disciples who were NOT apostles were St. Paul, Mark the Evangelist and Luke the Evangelist.
Two of the evangelists – John and Matthew – MAY have been apostles, but Mark and Luke absolutely were not.
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Footnotes:
I said “may” because modern scholars think that John the Apostle, John the Evangelist and John the author of Revelation are three different people. It’s not like John was a rare name. If they were all named Rumplestiltskin, we might assume they were the same guy.
John the Apostle was a fisherman, and was probably illiterate. Very few people were literate in those days, and those who were were either government officials or priests.
John who allegedly wrote the gospel and John of the Book of Revelation are assumed to be two literate individuals whose writing styles were very different. The majority view of modern Bible scholars is that the Book of Revelation was written by John of Patmos (neither John the Apostle, nor John the Evangelist)
Matthew the Evangelist may or may not have been the same person as Matthew the Apostle. The majority of biblical scholars reject the claim of gospel authorship by Matthew the Apostle, although the traditional authorship still has its defenders because Matthew the Apostle , unlike John the Apostle, was almost certainly literate. (He was a tax collector.)
I remember my 6th grade teacher, Sister Honoria, telling us that there was a widespread misconception that the authors of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were Apostles. In fact, as I understand that, the gospels were written several hundred years after the time of Jesus.
No, not that late. I think the best available info is that they were written about forty to eighty years after the death of Jesus
This means it is very unlikely that the contemporaries of Jesus were still around to write it, but not impossible.
Here is what Google’s AI says:
The four gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were written over the course of almost a century after Jesus’ death. Modern scholarship suggests the following dates of writing:
Gospel of Mark: 66–70 AD
Matthew: 85–90 AD
Luke: 85–90 AD
John: 90–110 AD
There is no convincing evidence to prove the true identities of the authors of the gospels. For various reasons, most scholars believe that significant portions of the three “synoptic” gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) were probably derived (with modifications and embellishments from gospel to gospel) from a single source document, the mysterious, elusive “Q document.” That document has never been found, so its existence remains theoretical and the identity of its author is likely to remain a mystery forever. If the scholars are correct, that single anonymous author is the only person with close to a first-hand account, and his story has been the single most important influence on 2000 years of belief about the major incidents in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. When you think about it, that anonymous man may be the single most influential person in human history, if indeed he existed at all.